Universe of Platonic Thought 2020

Seminar “Paideia in Ancient Culture”

Elena Timoschukl, CSc in Philosophy; Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow, Russia), Assistant Professor

Phenomenology as Platonism

The interpretation of Platonism by Edmund Husserl in the work of Arnold Thomas “Phänomenologie als Platonismus. Zu den Platonischen Wesensmomenten der Philosophie Edmund Husserls”, which digs out the deep root zones of Platonism in Husserl's phenomenology.

Keywords: Platonism, Husserl, phenomenology, eidetics, intersubjectivity

The report is a review of the book by the German professor Arnold Thomas “Phenomenology as Platonism. On the essential platonic aspects of Edmund Husserl's philosophy "(Arnold T. Phänomenologie als Platonismus. Zu den Platonischen Wesensmomenten der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2017 333 pp.)

The book was published based on the materials of the dissertation in 2017 “Plato's bastard. Systematic and historical research on the Platonic elements of Edmund Husserl's philosophy.

A. Thomas, first of all, thoroughly studies all of Husserl and finds his direct and indirect statements about Plato. Thus, he reminds the reader that Husserl spoke of Descartes's philosophy as a "modification" of Plato's philosophy, and Descartes's philosophy was a beacon of rationality for the creator of phenomenology. In his lectures, Husserl proposed an interpretation of the Socratic approach, in which he discovers the archetype of his eidetic, correlated Plato's anamnesis with the significance of the a priori in phenomenology, and compared Plato's maieutics with the doctrine of pure essences.

However, such references are not evidence of a systemic acceptance of Plato as one of the founders of phenomenology. Husserl follows his own path of self-reflection and historical revision of European philosophy. A. Thomas believes that Platonism and phenomenology have much more implicit intersections and addresses six problem areas: 1) the place of philosophy in scientific knowledge, 1) the ethical component of philosophy, 3) philosophy as a polemic, 4) the world of life in philosophy, 5 ) eidos and laws of eidetics, 6) philosophy and the absolute.

A. Thomas teaches philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. The direction of his research is the thematization of phenomenology and metaphysics. The main speculative interlocutors of the author are Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. In addition to the platonic configuration of phenomenology, Arnold Thomas deals with the problematization of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl as a path to metaphysics, the analysis of the presence of phenomenology in cyberspace, the study of temporality, corporeality and intersubjectivity, and the forecast of the future of phenomenology.

The social direction of the scientist's activity is to assist in the work of the State Foundation "Humanism Today" (Baden-Württemberg) and to guide the student seminar against populism and fascism "Applied logic or why there is so little common sense in politics"